Tag: palestine

… but one that does not silence discussions on justice for Palestine.

Since the election of Donald Trump, there has been a renewed interest across the country in Muslim-Jewish partnership. Trump’s ascension to power on a platform of racism and xenophobia has caused many to fear what lies ahead.

From potential policy measures, such as a Muslim registry and the intensification of the Countering Violent Extremism Initiative, to the emboldening of white supremacist groups bent on causing physical harm to both Muslims and Jews, there is an urgent sense that we all need to come together to weather this fascist storm.

This renewed sense of solidarity is welcomed, and after Trump’s inauguration, our communities are ready to take to the streets in unity and strength. But for us to build meaningful and accountable relationships between our communities, we need to also share some principles. Without doing so, we run grave risks of subverting the dignity and freedom of expression for which our communities strive.

Today, many of the groups eager to rush to the frontlines of Muslim-Jewish partnership after Trump’s election – groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) – have for decades been complicit in helping create the climate of Islamophobia they claim to abhor.

The ADL was applauded when, after Trump’s election, its executive director publicly pledged that, he would register as a Muslim if a Muslim registry was created, and the AJC recently announced a partnership with the Islamic Society of North America called the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council.

But how do these actions stand up to their track record?

Living up to reputation

Since 9/11, the ADL has demonised mainstream Muslim community groups as “terrorist sympathisers”, praised far-right Islamophobes for securing federal appointments, opposed the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero, and more.

The AJC lobbied for bills that would drastically expand the state surveillance of American Muslim communities, supported our nation’s first Muslim registry in 2002, and backed anti-Muslim congressional hearings. These are just a few ways these groups, in the last decade alone, have betrayed the principles they claim to uphold.

Far too often, interfaith partnerships with groups like the ADL and AJC create pressure on Muslim organisations to remain silent on Israel/Palestine, or to attack the movement for Palestinian rights, out of fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. In too many interfaith partnerships, Muslims are required to put “relationships before politics” and the “local over international”, effectively stifling their political agency.

In these and other ways, these relationships tend to be transactional in nature. The Jewish community gains a Muslim friend that won’t mention Zionism, Israel or its politics, and the Muslim gains some perceived level of acceptance in the mainstream United States of America, which touts itself as a land of “Judeo-Christian” values but increasingly sees Islam and Muslims as the enemy other.

As campus organisers with American Muslims for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, we’ve worked for years to build accountable partnerships between Muslims and Jews, founded on principles of justice, solidarity and love.

These principles animate our vision of a just and democratic peace in Israel/Palestine, where refugees can return to their ancestral homes and equal rights are guaranteed for Palestinians and all other peoples living in the region.

Guided by these principles, the Muslim and Jewish students we work with on campuses across the country stand united, alongside others of all faiths and ethnicities, in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for freedom, justice and equality in Israel/Palestine.

Atmosphere of fear

For decades, vocal supporters of Palestinian rights in the US have faced false charges of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel organisations. To name two recent examples, in late 2016, the ADL joined attacks against the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, in his bid for Democratic National Committee chair, because of comments critical of Israel.

And in a move that hits close to home for us, the ADL recently tried, unsuccessfully, to pressure Congress to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, a bill that, by labelling campus criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, would have empowered the Department of Education under the Trump administration to suppress student activism.

On and off campus, this backlash inevitably hits Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities the hardest, crystallising the cloud of fear that has far too long limited freedom of speech for the Arab and Muslim community.

We urge American Muslim groups not to partner with organisations like the ADL and the AJC, so long as they continue to limit discourse on Israel/Palestine, and to oppose the demands of Palestinians for justice and freedom.

When pro-Israel groups such as the ADL suppress freedom of speech with false anti-Semitism charges, they are furthering US’s climate of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.

For decades, pro-Israel advocacy has worked to create a climate where Israel is seen as a faithful ally and frontline defender in the West’s “war on terror”, and Palestinians – and, by extension, all Arabs and Muslims – are seen as antisemitic “terrorists”.

The end result, today, is a Trump administration that blends unflinching support for Israel’s apartheid policies with white nationalism and rabid Islamophobia, and an extremist Israeli government that enjoys an international green light for its deepening violations of international law.

A Muslim-Jewish alliance is needed

Let us not be mistaken: in the age of Trump, it is more important than ever for Muslims and Jews to come together to combat Islamophobia and real anti-Semitism. Today in the US, we are both targets of the white supremacist alt-right movement, which, with the appointment of Breitbart executive Steve Bannon to a powerful position in the Trump White House and the growth of white nationalists in local communities, is emerging as a dangerous force.

A Muslim-Jewish alliance makes historical sense; Jews and Muslims lived together in relative harmony across the Middle East and parts of Europe for millennia, while white Christian Europe subjected our communities, in different ways, to vicious persecution.

We are confident that principled, accountable partnerships between Muslims and Jews can and must be built as we forge a path forward in this frightening time.

But now is not the time to compromise our values out of fear. Support for Palestinian rights is moving mainstream, and the Israel advocacy movement is losing its ability to police discourse in the US.

As the movement for Palestinian human rights is gaining traction, Israel’s defenders, from the incoming Trump administration to the ADL, are anxiously doubling down on their decades-long campaign of policing, silencing and repression of critical discourse.

Our shared vision of justice and collective liberation teaches us that Zionism – the project to maintain an exclusionary state with an enforced demographic Jewish majority on dispossessed Palestinian land – is incompatible with the values of dignity and freedom which any Muslim-Jewish partnership must hold dear.

We urge American Muslim groups not to partner with organisations like the ADL and the AJC, so long as they continue to limit discourse on Israel/Palestine and to oppose the demands of Palestinians for justice and freedom.

We call on these ,and many other American Jewish groups, to end work to suppress the movement for Palestinian rights in the US, renounce their anti-Muslim history and join the movement for a truly just peace in Israel/Palestine.

Then, and only then, can relationships of mutual respect and cooperation come to fruition and have the capacity, structure and commitment to work towards transformative change here in the US and globally.

Now is not the time to cosy up to the powerful elites of this country, as leaders of our communities have done for too long. Now is the time for all our communities to build our power from the ground up. Only solidarity and joint struggle against all forms of oppression can protect Muslims, Jews and all people from the forces of hatred in this world.

Taher Herzallah is the Associate Director of Outreach and Grassroots Organizing for the American Muslims for Palestine.

((Palestinian village of ‘Imwas after destruction by Israeli army, 1968)

(Ruins of Palestinian village of ‘Imwas, site of Jewish National Fund’s ‘Canada Park’, 1978)

Since the idea of Zionism first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals and the limbs of many agrarian pioneers in the early 20th century, the state of Israel has presented its settlement of the land of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the earth. By “greenwashing” the occupation, Israel hides its apartheid behind an environmentalist mirage, and distracts public attention not only from its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, but from its large-scale degradation of the earth upon which these tragedies unfold.

Determined to “make the desert bloom”, an international organisation — the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (JNF-KKL, or JNF) planted forests, recreational parks and nature reserves to cover over the ruins of Palestinian villages, as refugees were scattered far from, or worse, a few hilltops away from, the land upon which they and their ancestors had based their lives and livelihoods.

Today, as Israel portrays itself as a “green democracy”’, an eco-friendly pioneer in agricultural techniques such as drip irrigation, dairy farming, desert ecology, water management and solar energy, Israeli factories drain toxic waste and industrial pollutants down from occupied West Bank hilltops into Palestinian villages, and over-pumping of groundwater aquifers denies Palestinians access to vital water sources in a context of increasing water scarcity and pollution.

Jewish National Fund

The Jewish National Fund (JNF), perhaps the first transnational environmental NGO, was established in 1901, as the first wave of Jewish immigrants were settling in Palestine under the banner of Zionism. Throughout the 20th century, as the indigenous Arab population of Palestine found itself either expelled from its homeland or oppressed under the hand of a foreign invader, the JNF succeeded in raising enormous amounts of money to acquire and develop land throughout the territory that, in 1948, would become known as the State of Israel. Distinct from other transnational Zionist fundraising and advocacy organisations, such as the Jewish Agency, the JNF portrayed itself, from the beginning, as an environmental organisation, serving, according to its website, to “protect the land, green the landscape and preserve vital ecosystems” by “planting seedlings, maintaining forest health, combating desertification, protecting watersheds and managing water flow … [and] balancing the phenomenal growth and development Israel has experienced in the last decade with the maintenance of an ecologically sound environment”.

Proud that “Israel is the only country in the world that will enter the 21st century with a net gain in numbers of trees”, the JNF credits itself with planting 250 million trees, building more than 210 reservoirs and dams, developing more than 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1000 parks and providing the infrastructure for more than 1000 communities throughout Israel. Suiting a state constructed for a single cultural-religious group, the JNF promotes an exclusionary, discriminatory brand of environmentalism. From its inception in 1901 — when the JNF controlled but a single olive grove in a land where 94% of its neighbours were Arab — to today, working closely with the Israel government, the JNF directly owns 13% of Israel’s land and effectively controls another 80%. The JNF’s constitution has explicitly stated that its land cannot be rented, leased, sold to or worked by non-Jews.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the JNF– helping to exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, bulldoze their homes and clear the land to make way for Jewish settlement — bought large tracts of land from absentee landowners, evicted local Arab tenant farmers, uprooted natural vegetation of olive, carob and pistachio trees, and planted throughout the land, in place of indigenous arboreta, vast swaths of Europeanpinera (conifers) and eucalyptus trees.

Forests, parks and recreational facilities were strategically placed atop the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, so that the fast-growing pines would erase the history of Palestinian existence and prevent refugees from ever returning to their homes. In addition, pine forests were planted to guard and expand settlements built atop stolen land and, after 1967, to seize and divide Palestinian territory within east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

The pines helped evoke images of a European wilderness, creating a familiar “natural” environment for the mostly European Jewish settlers, so much so that settlers affectionately nicknamed Carmel National Park, planted partially over the destroyed Palestinian village of al-Tira, “little Switzerland” for its resemblance to the Swiss Alps. Foreign species, these pine forests, then and now, often fail to adapt to the local soil and require frequent re-planting. As they age, they demand more water and become more prone to problems like pests, disease and conflagrations, such as the 2010 Carmel wildfire, deemed the worst in Israel’s history. As their fast-growing acidic pine needles fall to the ground, they destroy all other surrounding small plants, thus ruining the livelihood of Palestinian shepherds, whose animals depend on grazing land.

Clear-felling Palestinian villages

The JNF’s time-tested method of ethnically cleansing and then “greening” the desert continues to this day. An ongoing $600 million, 10-year JNF program called Blueprint Negev seeks to develop reservoirs, pine afforestation and water conservation programs in the Negev desert at the expense of more than 150,000 Palestinian Bedouin, whose “unrecognised” villages, as a direct result of Israel’s policies, already lack electricity, running water and sewage disposal.

Since 2010, the JNF has attempted to “green” the Negev by planting the 1 million-pine “GOD TV Forest” over the Palestinian village of Al-Araqib, which, as it steadfastly resists extinction, has been demolished eight times. GOD TV Forest is named after its proud sponsor, a far-right, pro-settler Evangelical Christian organisation whose stated purpose is “to plant a million trees to prepare the land for the return of [God’s] son”. As GOD TV Forest and Blueprint Negev seek to flood the semi-arid Negev with the invasive European pine trees, Israel seeks to tear the historically semi-nomadic Bedouin from their ancestral grazing lands, and to herd them into unnatural, sedentary lifestyles in impoverished and isolated townships. Social strife and decay of traditional values inevitably accompany this forced acculturation process.

Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my family, along with the larger middle-class Jewish community, was, knowingly or not, complicit in the JNF’s environmental colonialism. Nearly every room of our local synagogue and Hebrew School displayed the iconic blue, tin JNF donation box, where, by simply dropping a coin, one could affirm one’s ethnic nationalism by helping “plant a tree in Israel”. Throughout my early childhood, my mother worked at a local JNF donation office, helping US Jewish families “plant a tree in Israel” to commemorate the death of a loved one.

Today, after a century of expulsion, settlement, development and rapid industrialisation, indigenous arboreta make up only 11% of Israeli forests, and pre-1948 growth accounts for only 10% of Israel’s greenery. Jewish National Fund pine forests, parks and recreation areas blanket the hills of Israel, and tour guides, in the midst of a hike, dread the inevitable moment when someone asks “what is that old abandoned mosque doing in the middle of this forest?” The parallels with European colonisation of the American continent are obvious, and in a cruel twist of historical irony, the construction, by JNF Canada, of Israel’s Canada National Park, covering over the destroyed Palestinian village of ‘Imwas in the mid-1980s, was initiated as a simultaneous twinning project along with Toronto’s Downsview Park, which sits atop unacknowledged First Nations territory.

Zionist image

The actions of the JNF fulfil the Zionist desire to transform and control the land of Palestine, to shape its hills in the Zionist image. When the pioneer Zionist movement arrived from Europe in the late 1800s, they found themselves dissatisfied with the rocky, semi-arid eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and they sought to “make the desert bloom” as proof that the Jewish people, and not the indigenous Arabs, were the destined cultivators of “a land without people for a people without land”.

The passionate attachment to the land evinced by these Zionist pioneers often concealed an anthropocentric kernel. Many of the first European Jewish immigrants struck the soil of Palestine with a devout and even mystical appreciation of nature, driven to escape the economic, industrial and social alienation of European society and, through the sweat of agricultural labour, to birth themselves, and the Jewish people, anew as an ecologically integrated, utopian socialist community. Living in collectivist communes called kibbutzim, their sense of destiny magnified by the redemptive, exalted status that the land beneath their feet held for thousands of years of Jewish cultural mythology, they filled their journals with passionate, sensual, ecstatic, mystical and sometimes erotic descriptions of the joys of the earth and agricultural labour. As Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann observed, “it seems as if God had covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds”.

At the same time, their ecological zeal betrayed a deeply colonial, anthropocentric desire, not to respect and adapt to the land, but to subjugate and transform it, to conquer it through the machinations of human development. “Where we modern ones appear with our auxiliaries”, announced Zionist prophet Theodore Herzl at the turn of the century, “we turn the desert into a garden”. The motif of “making the desert bloom” emphasises not the desert rocks, but the human agency which controls nature for its own purposes. In one fell swoop, the land of Palestine would be cleared, along with its people, the Arab Palestinians, who, Weizmann maintained, were no different than “the rocks of Judea … obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path”.

Green, racist capitalism

Today, thanks to decades of largely US aid, the old kibbutzim have become factory suburbs, and the small, start-up socialist Zionist experiment has ballooned into the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world, the privatised, globally competitive, hyper-militarised Israel that markets itself abroad as a model for 21st century green capitalism, while perpetuating widespread ecological devastation and blatant environmental racism on the ground. “What country would not experience environmental woes”, says Jewish eco-socialist Joel Kovel in his book, Overcoming Zionism, “with a sixfold population increase in half a century in a context of rapid industrialization?” Kovel describes the steady expansion of Israel’s infrastructure of occupation, and the irreversible build-up of its desert war machine, as an “eco-destructive accelerant”, wedding coloniser and colonised together in a “parasitic order” that “builds parallel systems, of roads, water and sewage, electrical networks… [that] both colonize and destroy the land of the Palestinians, while creating, necessarily, a myriad of spaces … chaotically thrown up and turning into sites of a proliferating set of ecological degradations”.

Today, Israel covertly transports waste products from its own country into dumps and quarries throughout the occupied West Bank, polluting the Palestinian earth and water supply, while Israeli settlers in the West Bank — who produce similar amounts of wastewater to the Palestinian population, despite being outnumbered more than six to one — deliberately poison the water, land and livestock of nearby Palestinian villages. Solid wastes from Israeli settlements and military camps throughout the West Bank are dumped without restriction on Palestinian land, fields and side roads, and industry regularly moves from Israel to the West Bank, where labour is cheaper, environmental regulations are lenient and waste products, generated from the production of aluminium, leather tanning, textile dyeing, batteries, fiberglass, plastics and other chemicals, can flow freely down to Palestinian villages in surrounding valleys.

At least seven industrial zones, and at least 200 factories, have either moved from Israel into the West Bank, or have been constructed by the Israel government, inside the West Bank, a blatant violation of international law.

After one such factory, Geshuri Industries, moved its pesticide, insecticide and fertiliser production from Israel, where it was declared a health hazard, into the West Bank in 1982, the owner began the courteous practice of closing the factory for the one month every year that a change in wind direction would blow its pollutants towards Israel.

The construction, beginning in 2002, of Israel’s mammoth separation/apartheid wall, while separating Palestinian farmers from their fields, has destroyed Palestinian legally owned fertile agricultural land, and has brought with it all the extensive contamination of natural habitats associated with the use of heavy machinery and millions of tons of concrete. The wall has isolated Palestinian communities from vital water sources, and has interfered with natural drainage systems in the West Bank, causing flooding and substantial environmental and agricultural damage in times of high rainfall.

West Bank and Gaza

The JNF’s “greening” of Israel does not extend to the West Bank and Gaza, where the infrastructure of occupation breeds widespread deforestation. While the JNF made the hilltops within the internationally recognised borders of Israel bloom with forests, parks, playgrounds and recreation areas so that, to quote its website, “the heroic men and women of the Israel Defense Forces can share precious time with their loved ones”, 95% of the forests of Gaza have disappeared between 1971 and 1999, due to the extensive spread of settlements and military bases alongside Israel’s pervasive bombing. Contrary to the JNF’s commitment to “combat desertification”, the threat of permanent desertification looms over the West Bank, as increasing illegal settlement expansion, facilitated by the JNF, steals large tracts of land traditionally used by Palestinian villages for grazing, leaving the few remaining grazing areas available to Palestinian pastoralists threatened by overgrazing.

For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the monitoring, maintenance and protection of natural ecosystems becomes impossible, as the Israeli occupation paralyses their sovereign ability to regulate usage of a contiguous piece of land. Restrictions on freedom of movement, such as road closures, checkpoints and permanent roadblocks, impede the collection, processing, treatment and disposal of waste products, which, when released into residential areas, agricultural land and groundwater aquifers, cause soil contamination and potentially irreversible ground water pollution.

Water

Israel’s discriminatory distribution of water is an instance of environmental racism at its worst. “Presently”, writes Joel Kovel, Israel “faces both an absolute shortage of water owing to persistent overconsumption, as well as persistent contamination of the existing water thanks to rampant ‘development’ and industrialization”. As population growth, combined with a rising standard of living, has led to an over-utilisation of renewable water sources, Israel embarks on costly cloud-seeding and desalination experiments to increase its water supply, while destroying the rain-water cisterns and wells of agrarian Palestinian villages.

The Jordan River, an international river basin unilaterally monopolised by Israel, has seen its average flow decrease from 1250 million cubic metres (mcm)/year in 1953 to 152-203 mcm due to two enormous reservoirs, and has become so polluted by Israeli settlement and industry run-off that, to the dismay of Christian pilgrims worldwide, the environmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East decreed it unsafe for baptism in 2010. As the Jordan River is drained to a trickle, the Dead Sea, also polluted, has shrunk into two separate, and rapidly drying, seas further downstream, as its salts are pumped by Israeli companies to flood the global market with exotic cosmetic products.

As over-pumping of regional underground aquifers, all monopolised by Israel, has lowered the groundwater table below sea level and caused saline water intrusion in many areas, growing water scarcity is used by Israel as a tool of oppression against the Palestinians. In the Jordan Valley, an oppressive matrix of checkpoints, closed military zones, army training grounds, nature reserves, settlements and settler-only roads striates the desert with the infrastructure of environmental racism, isolating Palestinian Bedouin villages from access to water sources.

Impoverished communities — 40% of whom consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization — must travel across a desert, criss-crossed with Israeli checkpoints, to bring overpriced and often unsanitary water tankers home to scattered villages of makeshift shacks and mud-brick houses. While the 56,000 Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 million cubic metres (mcm) of water per year, the 9400 Israeli settlers consume an average of 41 mcm.

Sustainable agricultural practices are made difficult because of water scarcity, and perishable produce, delayed for hours at Israeli checkpoints, often spoils on its way to market. While “unrecognised” Bedouin villages live in dire poverty, cut off from basic services such as health care, education and employment, and barred by Israel’s laws from building any permanent structure, be it a water well, an animal pen, a storage shed or a family home, 36 Israeli Jordan Valley agricultural settlements utilise state-of-the-art technology, along with an unlimited water supply, to grow a wide variety of genetically modified fruit and vegetable produce, propelling Israel into the international agribusiness industry as the world’s sixth-largest cultivator of genetically modified crops.

While Bedouin families see their makeshift structures demolished by Israeli bulldozers on a daily basis, every Israeli settler family in the Jordan Valley is given, in addition to an unlimited water supply, a free house, US$20,000, 70 dunnams (km2) of land, free health care and a 75% discount on electricity, utilities and transportation.

Lake Hula

The ethnic cleansing and ecological degradation of Lake Hula in 1950 provides a perfect example of the JNF’s catastrophic failure as an environmental organisation, and cruel success as a colonial enterprise. In 1933 the Palestine Land Development Corporation, using JNF and private funds, forcibly evicted the Ghawarani tribe from one of the oldest documented lakes and wetlands in history, the Huleh Valley in the eastern Galilee near Syria. Descendants of deserters from the invading Egyptian army in the 1830s, and Algerian refugees from the failed 1847 revolt against French rule, the Ghawarani had lived for two centuries in reed huts, mud-brick shacks and woollen tents, practicing reed basket and mat weaving, seasonal agriculture, fishing and the raising of livestock such as chicken, geese and water buffalo.

Echoing founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion’s 1944 proclamation that “we must conquer the sea and the desert, for those will provide us with room for new settlers and will serve as a laboratory for the development of new forms of economic and agricultural endeavor”, the JNF, anxious to form a buffer of agricultural expansion between Israel and Syria, drained Lake Hula in 1950 without a study of its ecological impact, ignoring the warnings of scientists that the peat soil under the swamps would not make fertile land.

Agricultural development of the exposed peat soils, weathered and eroded by wind without their vegetation cover, proved unsuccessful, and the reckless experiment destroyed a rich, diverse ecosystem of aquatic biota, flora and fauna unique to the region. Despite one JNF hydrologist’s certainty that “our peat is Zionist peat … our peat will not do damage”, the decomposing peat soils released nutrients and ground pollutants into the Jordan River and the entropic Lake Tiberius, creating crop-damaging black dust and making large tracts of land susceptible to damaging underground fires. The Hula Valley was left stagnant and largely depopulated, until a $23 million JNF re-flooding in 1996 created the smaller and shallower Lake Agmon, restoring a meagre portion of the area’s now-extinct wildlife.

Justice

As the dependence of the imperial West on Gulf oil increases precipitously, Israel’s occupation of Palestine becomes a crucial focal point for the global dominance of Empire, and a concentrated site of its cruellest eco-genocidal machinations. In Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we see how environmental devastation coincides with ethnic cleansing, and how the former is used to deepen the latter. The quest for justice in Palestine lies at the heart of anti-imperialist struggle worldwide, a struggle in defence of the Earth, and the dispossessed who wander upon it.

In the words of Coya White Hat-Artichoker, member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and founding member of the LGBTQ Two Spirit First Nations Collective:

I see what is happening in Palestine as an indigenous struggle for sovereignty, at times, even the right to exist. It is also one of genocide… I see Israel’s systemic and intentional destruction and removal of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities as very similar to the destruction of communities, lives, and removal of Native people from their traditional lands. I no longer see terrorists there anymore; I see people resisting and fighting extinction… I believe that as people in the US who make these connections, it’s important to be thoughtful about what is happening, in our names and with the US government’s money.

I gave this interview sitting in bed at 9 in the morning to a South African Islamic radio station. I wouldn’t call myself a ‘former Zionist’ really, though I suppose I did write that in this blog’s ‘About’ section…

On Wednesday 14 September, a rally was held in Hebron to officially rename downtown Shuhada Street ‘Apartheid Street’, in protest against the Israeli occupation that for nearly 20 years has shut down the once-thriving town center,

Israeli soldiers gather around demonstrators, who explain to them that the ceremony is a non-violent action (Photo: Heather Stroud)

severely curtailed freedom of movement and caused for the Palestinians of Hebron humiliation, harassment and persecution at the hands of settlers and Israeli soldiers.

The rally and renaming ceremony were organized by Youth against Settlements, a committee that since 2009 has organized non-violent demonstrations and actions to raise awareness of the occupation that plagues the over 165,000 Palestinian residents of Hebron. A crowd of Palestinians, internationals and journalists gathered at the heavily guarded checkpoint entrance to Apartheid Street at 1 p.m.,waving signs and placards and emblazoning, with stencils and spray paint, the walls of the area with the proclamation ‘Welcome to Apartheid Street’. Despite the explicitly peaceful nature of the protest, a crowd of 20-30 Israeli soldiers immediately assembled across from the protesters and on the rooftops surrounding the site. Rifles loaded with tear gas canisters and stun grenades, they quickly strung up razor wire to block the path of the protestors, though the latter incessantly repeated their peaceful intentions.

At a press conference, Youth against Settlements member Issa Anmo told a gathering crowd of Palestinians and journalists that “on behalf of all the Palestinian residents of Hebron we have one simple demand- open Shuhada Street and end the occupation. We are changing the name of this street to Apartheid Street for many reasons. The reasons are- only Israelis and foreign tourists are allowed to access Shuhada Street. It becomes as a ghost town. The street is closed to the Palestinian residents of Hebron…Palestinian residents who live on the street are prevented from going on the street, and to enter and exit their homes, and to get to their businesses. Some families are using back roads, and some other families are using the roofs to get to their homes. Shops have been closed by many military orders, [and] it’s forbidden for many Palestinians to drive on the road. Imagine that you are living on a street and it’s illegal for you to drive on the street!”

At the beginning of the 1990s, Apartheid Street was still the booming downtown marketplace of Hebron, and the commercial center of the entire southern West Bank, as it had been for centuries. Center of a vibrant community economy where Palestinian residents and farmers maintained small shops to sell fruits, vegetables and other goods, it was also the home street for thousands of Palestinian families who lived in apartments overlooking the bustling town centre. The May 2007 B’Tselem report ‘Ghost Town: Israel’s Separation Policy and Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron’ paints a bleak picture of the desolation inflicted upon Shuhada Street by the occupation in just two decades: “at least 1,014 Palestinian housing units in the center of Hebron have been vacated by their occupants. This number represents 41.9 percent of the housing units in the relevant area. Sixty-five percent (659) of the empty apartments became vacant during the course of the second intifada. Regarding Palestinian commercial establishments, 1,829 are no longer open for business. This number represents 76.6 percent of all the commercial establishments in the surveyed area. Of the closed businesses, 62.4 percent (1,141) were closed during the second intifada. At least 440 of them closed pursuant to military orders.”

Hebron’s bustling fruit and vegetable market in 1990

Israel’s occupation in Hebron has a turbulent history and over the past 40 years, one can discern familiar pattern: The one-sided domination of fundamentalist Zionism and its colonialist impetus, with the military backing of Israel trailing in its wake. In 1968, religious Jewish settlers rented a hotel in Hebron for Passover and barricaded themselves inside, refusing to leave; eventually, the Israeli army coaxed them out and established for them the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba to appease their desire to reclaim ‘Judea and Samaria’. In 1979, 40 women and children from Kiryat Arba repeated this brazen gesture, sneaking into an abandoned building on Apartheid Street in the middle of the night and, despite a lack of electricity, food and water, refusing to leave the next morning. This time, the Israeli army eventually allowed these squatters permanent residence in downtown Hebron, with full military support.

The fundamentalist settlers of Hebron are guided by the religious conviction that they are reviving a Jewish presence in Hebron that dates back 4000 years ago to the days of Abraham, who, along with most of the oldest patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament, is buried at the nearby Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque, which today is a half-synagogue, half-mosque structure, heavily guarded by the Israeli army. They are also determined to maintain their community in memory of the 1929 Hebron massacre which 82 years ago, in the midst of a tense political climate and rising animosity in Palestine, resulted in the deaths of 67 Hebron Jews and the evacuation of the entire Jewish community from the city. This massacre is contrary to the history of the two communities in the city, as Jews and Arabs had coexisted peacefully in Hebron for centuries, a peace attested to by the fact that several hundred Jewish lives were saved during the massacre by Palestinians, who hid Jewish families in their homes at considerable personal risk.

Since downtown Hebron was settled by Israelis in 1980, Apartheid Street and a small surrounding area have gradually become occupied by approximately 500 Jewish settlers (the term ‘Israeli settlers’ would be misleading in this case, as many of the settlers are recent arrivals from the east coast of America), guarded by at least four times as many Israeli soldiers. The process of apartheid over the last 20 years has been complex and gradual, but unmistakable in its intentions. After a massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque in February 1994, in which 29 Palestinians were killed and over 100 wounded by an Israeli settler from Kiryat Arba, the Israeli military began to pursue an official separation policy that closed the shops of Apartheid Street, blocked off the Jewish area, already heavily guarded and controlled, from the rest of Hebron, and sought to remove most Palestinian presence from the settler enclave.

Hebron’s fruit and vegetable market in 2007, closed by the Israeli army

In 1997, Hebron was officially split into two areas- H1, 18 square kilometers, under Palestinian control and containing most of Hebron’s Palestinian population; and H2, 4 square kilometers in the absolute center of the city, encompassing Apartheid Street and much of Hebron’s Old City, under Israeli control and enclosing the settler population alongside a handful of Palestinian families who could not be coaxed or forced to leave. The Second Intifada in the early 2000’s brought, according to B’tselem, “unprecedented restrictions on Palestinian movement in the city, primarily a continuous curfew and closure of main streets to Palestinian residents…during the first three years of the Intifada, the army imposed a curfew on H-2 for a total of more than 377 days, including a curfew that ran non-stop for 182 days, with short breaks to obtain provisions. On more than 500 days, the army imposed a curfew that lasted for a few hours up to an entire day.”

In response to the military crackdown, which began in the 1990s and reached a feverish pitch in the 2000s, the vast majority of Palestinian apartments and storefronts in Apartheid Street have either been voluntarily abandoned or forcibly emptied out. Today, what was once a booming marketplace is now, indeed, a ghost town, traversed only by settlers, Israeli soldiers, and the occasional Palestinian who holds the proper permit.

“I was born just 50 meters from here”, says Issa Anmo, sitting in the office of the Christian Peacemaker’s Team on the border of H-1, “and I am not allowed to visit the house where I was born, I am not allowed to go back to my neighborhood to smell my flowers. At the same time, the settlers can do what they want inside my house!…why are they allowed and I am not allowed? They are civilians and I am a civilian! Why am I not allowed? Is their blood blue and my blood is dark, is black?…This is apartheid. Nobody can argue [with] me if it is apartheid or not.”

The 14 September rally, like many others held over the years, was meant to highlight this unjust and oppressive state of affairs and indeed, the disproportionate Israeli army presence at the explicitly peaceful rally itself highlighted the reality of everyday life for the Palestinian population of Hebron. “It was just a rally to explain what is happening in Hebron. At the beginning we were afraid we could not send out the message to explain what we were suffering from, but then the army and the Israeli police came and they put up the barbed wire and detained us, and prevented us from doing a civil right. They showed exactly what it means, that we are suffering from the apartheid and inequality in Hebron…I’m not happy the police came, but they showed the real face of the occupation, this is a reality.”

The rally also intended to highlight the resolve of the Palestinian people, and the fear of the Israelis, toward the upcoming September initiative at the UN. Says Issa, “it’s very connected to September…the Palestinians are suffering from occupation, from settlements, and from apartheid. And this activity was concentrating on apartheid, to tell the world look, there is a problem here! We do not want you to stand against Israel, we want you to stand against apartheid, against occupation, against the settlements. We are not asking people to stand against Israel or say anything bad about Israel, we are just asking them to stand with us against the occupation, against apartheid and against the settlements which are destroying our own lives and violating all our human lives.”

Not all Palestinians at the rally, however, were pleased that Apartheid Street was officially receiving a new name. Said resident Azmi Ah- Shouki, “I don’t want to change the name of Shuhada Street, because this name has a relationship with the history and suffering of the Palestinian people. We want the occupation to end and we are here always. The cccupation makes apartheid, but we are Shuhada Street.” Shuhada Street means ‘The Martyr’s Street’ in Arabic, and recalls the memory of those murdered at the Ibrahimi mosque during the massacre of 1994. A small faction of Palestinians showed up at the rally to oppose the decision, and later in the day the group partially covered many of the ‘Welcome to Apartheid Street’ wall stencils with black spray paint.

Issa, however, along with other members of Youth against Settlements, remains steadfast. “[These people don’t] know what apartheid means, that is the point. We need to educate the people more about apartheid. We are not changing the name really, we are just explaining, giving a description for the street, that it is an apartheid street. [The name is] officially changed, but it’s not a big change. Finish the apartheid, then it will be the same name [Shuhada Street] again”.

Walking away from the entrance to Apartheid Street as the rally dissipated, passing the endless storefronts of the Palestinian people of Hebron as he made his way through the crowded, narrow corridors of the Old City, Badia Dwaik, Deputy Coordinator of Youth against Settlements, expressed perfectly the prevailing feeling of the day- “We did many protests and demonstrations before, but it is important to get attention from the world media. I am happy because we announced this to raise awareness that it is now Apartheid Street. The message is rich, so I am happy.”

Today- crowds surging through the streets of Hebron with Palestinian flags waving, running through traffic in the middle of the morning, yelling and chanting, swarms and swarms of people. as the taxis rolled, as the shops baked bread, as grocers arranged and cut their meat, as mothers went shopping, as kids were walking to school, as cars were honking. Gathering and expanding on the street, surging forward, the crowd with flags and fists and chants- the PA came and blocked them, a resounding ‘boooooo’ through the crowd, yelling, chanting, children looking up at me- i had a camera, i was white, everyone swarmed around me, ‘take my picture!’, kids with palestinian flags and UN 194 banners posing for me, grabbing their brothers- the crowd surging forth past the PA guards, down the street, resounding cheers- then BOOM! BOOM!, the crowd doubled back, bodies turned to run towards me, surging mass pushing towards me, panicked faces running, I turned and ran as well, ran past old women trying to get bread and tomatoes from the market at 10 AM, ran past men in business suits, ran past taxi cabs with doors half open, and shopkeepers who looked startled, ran and jumped over boxes, tumbled over crates and skipped over tire tracks in the middle of the road- smell of tear gas began to hint in the air- BOOM! BOOM! children yelling, ‘allah hu akbar’ as we ran as one mass. Then stopped, panting, out of breath, doubled back to take pictures, people streaming onto side streets. The protest dissipated, PA and IDF standing by the checkpoint, looking guarded and bored and riled up and tense and at the ready. kids walked back together with rolled up palestinian flags, looked down at the ground, looked up and smiled again.

then baladayi square- huge billboards of hebron, UN 194, OCCUPATION OUT, PALESTINIAN STATE- thousands, thousands jumping and screaming and cheering. marching bands full of 10 year old kids in regal uniform. huge mobs of schoolgirls swarming past me, chanting and clapping, backpacks bouncing off their backs. mothers holding children, teenagers pouring water on each other, crowd surfing, pumping fists in the air, old men standing off to the side with their arms crossed, smiling. i was with a girl from ISM, the young palestinian men swarmed around her asking whatsyrname, ‘they are from a village and have never seen a foreigner’ an old man explained to us. shouting jumping crowds, thousands more marching past every minute with enormous banners with mahmoud abbas’ face, slogans. the hope! joy and optimism as trucks came up to give free water. the drums! happy crowds under the sun, everyone waving cheap palestinian flags, running up to you smiling hello! take my picture! singing and clapping, the cheer! even though the US will veto! the hope!

then the market. old old city, ancient market, cobble stones, narrow windy pathways. IDF soldiers standing in a line, firing tear gas, running, huge crowds running, screaming. whirlwind, stampede, like gazelles, we duck in an alleyway and see the kids and adults running, running, and then a moment later the soldiers, running, running after them. all the screaming. here, at two in the morning before i go to bed, with mosquitoes kissing the screen in front of me, i can only remember the BOOM, and the screaming. some palestinians took us up on a roof to watch- six fresh faced young IDF soldiers on an adjacent rooftop, crouching, looking down below. Down below, in an alleyway, young shebab with kafiyas on their faces, throwing stones and running. not more than ten years old, they peep out from behind an alleyway, chuck a stone up at the roof, or down the alley, then disappear again. some have fancy home made slingshot, they whirl it in the air and launch the stone as a projectile that, if it hit at the right spot, could be mildly frightening, even for a heavily armored and armed soldier. then the tear gas hits the ground beside them, and they run. battle like this for an hour, the kids never give up, for what? to resist. alleyways littered, covered with stones. battered street, marketplace closed. how could you continue to sell falafel as tear gas canisters roll on the street outside your shop? and yet they do it, life goes on for a city under siege, used to it, though battered, bruised city, marketplace closed by three pm. ghost town. bruised, licking its wounds. tomorrow morning the shops will open again. i remember, in the midst of the old city tear gas, a young boy runs up to me- you understand? he yells with frightened face, reddened and teared from gas. do you understand?!?!?

DOIKAYT

Welcome to Doikayt! This blog is about: radical Torah; fighting fascism and racism in the US; the Israel/Palestine conflict; Jewish history and identity; Yiddishkeit, and more.

The word ‘doikayt’, meaning ‘hereness’ in Yiddish, was the slogan of East-European Jewish socialists- we must struggle, with feet firmly planted where we stand, for the liberation of ourselves and all other people.

חזק חזק ונתחזק- Be strong, be strong, and may we strengthen one another!

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WHO IS DOIKAYT?

My name is Ben Lorber and I’m a writer, organizer, musician and radical Jew. Here mostly to smash fascism, raise the sparks, sing and bring Moshiach.

I make weird folksy music as Narrow Bridge- check out my Bandcamp! I live with my lovely partner and two cuddly cats in Chicago, Illinois.

This blog is where I put my political diatribes, philosophical musings, spiritual ponderings, and reflections on Jewish identity, history and more. It also houses occasional guest posts from comrades and chaverim.